On the Doorstep - Where I live

Mist and Morgans don't match too well this murky damp weather. Time to dehumidify the garage where she rests and take the camera for a session by the estuary.

Cockwood Harbour where the mud is very sticky

  Long-gone are the days when mud football was played here at low tide.

Such high spirited sport in soft, red Devon mud, once upon a time not so long ago.  Slippery fights along a greasy pole with soft pillows was also played over the mud.  Hard, white men turned chestnut brown here.

Two days later and wall to wall blue sky puts a new light on it all.  On my doorstep where the herons nest and the willow warblers warble and the wading birds whistle, down along the Exe Estuary. 

The avenue of cork trees 

Powderham in winter can be bleak when the east wind blows. Pink cheeked birdwatchers scan the Nature Reserve with khaki  camouflaged telescopes. I saw a short eared owl last year - a brown bird in a brown bush with barely visible brown ear tufts. I was alerted by a birder to its presence, but it might as well have been a woolen tea cosy blown there from the nearby Swans Nest eatery, such was the dull, motionless appeal of this creature.  More curious to me that a birder from the other side of the country chose to motor here, prompted by another, then another willey nilley, not knowing if the bird would sit still on this branch.

At Powderham church

 

The deer park and Powderham Castle

The river Kenn now back to normal levels.